


Dance With Me, Now Darling

by Polly_Lynn



Series: TARDIS-Verse [25]
Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, Estrangement, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Marriage, Marriage Proposal, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 00:49:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20267293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: He feels like he’s falling. Like he’s been falling for days hurtling into weeks, now, and he doesn’t know when it will stop. He doesn’t know how, not after Montreal and staring his own betrayal in the face. Literally in the face.





	Dance With Me, Now Darling

**Author's Note:**

> This is the 25th installment in the TARDIS-verse. It’s a loose sequel to "Stop Making Sense" (which is installment 12). This is after Montreal (7 x 02), but before Time of Our Lives (7 x 07). I don’t think you have to have read "Stop Making Sense" to read this, and you don’t need to know anything about the TARDIS-verse other than it starts in Season 4, post-Kill Shot, and the concept is that Castle and Beckett have “Time Out” dates that don’t count in the daylight. Other than borrowing the idea of the TARDIS, the series has nothing to do with Doctor Who. 

> "I've been here in the corner, playing it cool  
But I could hang off your shoulder like a fool  
Like a fool, now darling, all night long  
Dance with me, now darling, to this song"  
—Hem, “Dance With Me, Now Darling”

He feels like he’s falling. Like he’s been falling for days hurtling into weeks, now, and he doesn’t know when it will stop. He doesn’t know how, not after Montreal and staring his own betrayal in the face. Literally in the face.

The videos haunt him. The idea that anything could have driven him to make them, even _his _imagination comes up empty on that score. They haunt him, and he reaches out blindly for a handhold. 

_We should get married._

There’s more he wants to say—needs to say—but it hardly matters. It’s all a desperate shout, quiet and firm as it is. It’s a cry with his head tipped back in search of daylight, and nothing that makes its way out of his mouth could stop him falling.

She’s kind about it. For all the wounds they’ve both inflicted in the awful, bewildering time since he’s been back—since he woke up—she’s kind in the moment.

_A month?_ she says, and he knows it’s not punishment. He feels the weary weight of her body against his own, and he knows that’s not how she means it. It's a worn-out question, nothing more. A wavering plea for patience.

_For proof._

Something wounded deep inside him hisses the words. Something wild and terrified that whispers in his ear that he'll never have her back. Not truly, but he hits out at that, too. Falling still, he digs in his heels against such grim certainty and refuses the very idea. His chin juts up and out. It must be a stubborn angle in silhouette from her perspective.

_A month._

His teeth come together hard. It sounds sullen, the echo of her words, even though he doesn’t mean it to be punishment anymore than she does. That’s just how it comes out. 

_A month._

* * *

She knows it was the right thing. She's pretty sure most of the time. Some of the time. 

However much it broke her heart—broke_ his _heart—she knows it would've been foolish to say yes when they’ve fought so long and hard. 

_We should get married. Tomorrow. _

She knows the aching, terrible start it would have been for the two of them to make on the rest of their lives. She knows the scars it would have left in the end, even though they would have weathered it. She knows that, too. She really _does_ know they can weather anything, but it's not the beginning they were meant to have. It’s not the beginning they _will_ have. 

_A month._

It's the right thing, but it's hard. She loves him. The fact of it takes up so much space inside her, in head and heart and whatever else there is. Even with unease rising and falling in her like tides, it takes up so much _space_. With the weight of a decade as a professional skeptic trying to shout down all her unshakeable faith, she _loves _him. She believes in him, and she wants badly to get married. To _be_ married. She wants it _so_ badly, and she knows he does too. 

It’s left him untethered, this thing she’s asked for. Every bit as much as the gaping black stretch of days, weeks, _months_ he’s lost, it’s left him awkward and absent minded, sorrowful in a way she's never seen, even when he plays at normal when there’s someone else around. Ryan or Esposito. Lanie or Martha or Alexis. Then he plays at normal, but he’s not particularly good at it. 

It’s left him contrite and careful and fucking _alien_, and she opens her mouth a hundred times an hour to tell him—to snap or shout or murmur gently against his skin—that this isn't what she meant. That he’s got nothing to prove, and she never meant for him to do penance. That's not why she said it. Not why she asked for it.

_A month._

She opens her mouth a hundred times an hour, but nothing comes out.

He sees it. He feels the tug of her sudden silences and he turns toward her. She never gives him an explanation, though. She doesn't really have one, and she’s not at all sure it would help either one of them, even if she did. She just knows that asking for time—giving them time—was the right thing, and she knows they can do this. They _are_ doing it, every day that’s eternal and swiftly passing all at once. They’ll keep on doing it, she knows.

_A month._

* * *

He needs it, as it turns out. He needs time to fall apart, and he needs a safe haven to do it in. He needs every one of the dumb movies that it turns out he’s missed entirely, and the bad-for-them meals on the heaping plates they balance on the wide leather arms of his office chairs. He needs to be with her, and he needs her to be with him. 

It’s a revelation and a sobering thought. It’s a conundrum and the answer to a prayer he never uttered.

It’s good. Most days, it's good. And every day—every single one—he knows that they’re working their way back to where they were. They’re working their way _beyond_ where they were, and it’s nothing like the purgatory he’d imagined that first night. It’s nothing like the torture his guilty mind had conjured up the instant she’d lifted sorrowful eyes to his and asked.

_A month?_

There's the work that’s always anchored them. There’s the phone ringing at odd hours, as it always has. And absent that, there’s the routine of it all. _Work. _Real clothes and coffee set to brew on a schedule.

He's grumbled for years about the grind, of course. He’s made a production of having to put on pants and shaken his fist at the sheer unfairness of what constitutes _a decent hour_ as far as the institutions of justice are concerned. He’s railed against it, mostly, if not entirely, for laughs and for the drama of it, as is his birthright.

But now he finds there’s something loose and jangling at the back of his mind. There’s a terrible, gnawing worry in the pit of his stomach that echoes loudly, painfully, in every hollow place and tells him that he definitely needs exactly this right now. Vocation or avocation or whatever. He needs routine and _work._

And he needs the rest, too. He needs the time and space for unscheduled meltdowns and ferocious bouts of bleak depression, because _left_ her. He left his daughter and his mother and his _life—_this hard-won mess that actually means something—and he needs time to mourn those two months, to work through them and to get some damned distance from the undeniable, inalterable fact of that.

He needs low light and scotch and solitude that comes with a safety net. He needs her lips at the nape of his neck in the dead of night. He needs the grace of her strong, elegant fingers sliding between his own when _she's_ the one who needs it, scotch and low light and the eventual creak of the floorboard, because there are nights when she needs him to come looking for her as much as he needs her to come looking for him, and that’s what happens. It happens, sooner and sooner each night, except when it doesn’t.

It doesn’t happen sometimes, because there are nights that neither one of them needs to come looking.There are nights, more and more, when he’s able to tough it out, or she is, even if sleeping all the way through is some distant fantasy on an elusive horizon. Some nights, he stays put and so does she, at least until the hiss of the coffee pot ushers in another day.Some nights, that’s a badge of honor, a victory they seal with a weary smile and an emphatic kiss.

_A month?_

He needs it, but it stretches out, too. On the good days that dawn more and more frequently, it feels like forever since he’s been back. It feels like he never left, and he knows that’s part of the problem. It’s too damnably easy to forget entirely that he _left_, and he knows that’s part of why she asked. He _understands _it. Really, he does, but a stubborn, eager, _essential _part of him looks to the future and wants to get on with it. He wants to get on with the rest of their lives.

It’s not that he can’t wait.He’s caught the secret of that now. He knows how to make himself still at night. Flat on his back, he’s caught the secret of reaching for the quiet beneath the_ tip-tap-tip_ of a busy, troubled mind. He knows it's against the rules to open his eyes, and he’s caught the knack of banishing even the desire to. He breathes in and out. He lets himself feel what he's feeling, however grim.However white hot and destructive, he lets himself feel what he feels. He lets it rise to the surface and dissipate, and he’s better for it. He’s nearer and nearer to whole again. 

He can wait. It’s within reach. Not easier, exactly, but within reach all the time. And still, it stretches out.

Even if he and she and they need it—even if they have the knack now—it stretches out.

* * *

Everything feels normal. Not all the time, but a lot of it, and she’s totally unprepared for that. They’re coming up on the end of it—the reprieve or whatever it is she’s asked for—and that seems impossible.

_A month?_

They’re coming up on the end. Not immediately, but soon, and they’re no closer to . . .anything than they were before. Not that she knows what she means by anything. She doesn’t have the faintest idea what _anything_ looks like or should have looked like. She casts her mind backward, but she hasn’t an inkling of what she might have really meant when she asked, and here they are, coming up on the end of it, and they’ve got . . .

_Nothing._

The word tumbles up and down and sideways through her, shocking in the abstract, terrifying in theory. If they’re no closer to anything, then they’re stuck on nothing, right? And whatever she’d said to him then—whatever she thought a month might bring them—the possibility of nothing hadn’t occurred to her.

She thinks, in a strangely subdued way, that she should be panicking about what comes next. She thinks the question of _what now?_ should have them both spiraling, when the time for that is so close. But they’re not spiraling, not at all. They’re back to normal.

Except it’s not that, exactly. _Back to._ It’s not that. It’s new. They’ve _arrived _at a new version of normal in spite of everything. In spite of the fact that neither her logic nor his wild imagination suggests anything that could possibly have justified his complicity or explains how in a million years he could have agreed to re-enter his own life in such bizarre fashion, they’ve achieved a new normal. Neither of them knows _anything, _and still, it’s almost entirely ok.

It’s ok when they’re flirting over coffee or arguing over the crossword. When they’re navigating the inner workings of the too-crowded loft, or dancing testily around the issue of her apartment and what to do about it.

It’s ok when they’re caught up in a case, and he’s a pain in the ass like he’s always been. It’s better than ok when his pain-in-the-assery gets them somewhere they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, and it’s stupid to be suspicious of that. It’s stupid to be looking at _normal_ out of the corner of her eye as though it’s the enemy, but that’s what she’s doing. That’s what she’s in the habit of as they careen toward the end of it.

_A month?_

“Everything ok?”

She shivers at the touch of his lips on the nape of her neck as he glides behind her at the kitchen sink. She comes back to herself—back to this particular normal—and smiles over her shoulder.

“Yeah,” she says, and it’s true. It’s true enough that it worries her. It drives her to inject something bright into it. “Of course.”

“Of course,” he echoes, just as bright, but he pauses. She’s not forcing it. Not exactly, and neither is he. He skims his palms over her shoulders and down her arms. He tickles the crease of each elbow like he always does to get a smile, a real smile. “Better than ok.”

He moves on. He pivots away from her toward the counter and the vibrant army of ingredients lined up on cutting boards, awaiting his attention. He chatters at her. He peppers the kitchen with aalf questions and snippets of dialogue and things he sings under his breath.

She answers back and ignores him. She sings along and snipes at him to change the channel, because she will not—will _not_—submit to having Gary Numan’s “In Cars” stuck in her head for the foreseeable future. 

She bumps him out of the way with her hip and takes the knife from his hand, because he’s doing the bell peppers wrong. He always does.

She sits down to a meal with him. Just the two of them, and then not just the two of them, as Martha wanders in to graze. Alexis stops to download her day before she whisks her plate away upstairs so she can study.

They sit down together, and it’s normal. It’s where they are after everything.

_A month._

* * *

They’re not in the same place. It takes him too long to realize it—almost the whole damned stretch of time she’s asked her—but as they finally close in on the end, he gets it: They’re not in the same place at all.

_A month._

It’s _finally_ almost behind them, and he excited. He’s not recovered or restored or whatever it is he should be after everything, but he’s buzzing with renewed certainty about the future. He’s eager and more than ready, and she’s . . . not.

The realization wants to be devastating. If a realization _wants_ anything at all, the moment when it hits him that they’re not in the same place at all wants badly to rip his heart out.

They’re cleaning up. It’s a rare, leisurely morning, and they’re clearing away the pans and plates and platters that have piled up as they’ve lingered at the breakfast bar, at the table where they’ve spread the newspaper out to share, on the couch with oversized mugs he’s topped up and she’s topped up, again and again and again. 

“We have a dishwasher,” he grumbles as she slaps a clean flour-sack towel into his hand before he can make good on his intention to snake an arm around her waist. Before he can tempt her back to the counter, the table, the couch. Before he can entice her right back to bed.

“It’s just us!” She laughs. She ducks away from him and busies herself at the sink full of suds. “And that thing’s a beast.” She points one toe and gestures with a long, elegant leg in the general direction of the appliance in question.

“A state-of-the-art beast.” He sulks for effect, but he sidles up next to her. “An energy-efficient, water-conserving—”

“—loud, steamy _beast_.” She flicks suds at him. She scrubs at a stubborn, dried bit of jam on the rim of a plate.

“Oh, but you _like_ loud and steamy, Beckett.” He plucks the sponge from her hand and tosses it aside. “You’re about to sign on for a lifetime . . . “ He takes one hand in his own and places the palm of the other at her hip. He lifts his arm and twirls her beneath it. “A _lifetime _of steamy and loud,” he finishes.

He reels her in, cheek to cheek. It’s a perfect execution of one of the few moves they’d had a chance to master in the dance lessons they’d squeezed in before the wedding. Before what was supposed to be the wedding, and he’s absurdly proud. He’s cocky enough to try for a dip when the truth cuts right through his easy, oblivious joy.

“A lifetime,” she says, and her chin tucks in toward her own collar bone. Her lashes flutter against her cheeks, and he feels the hitch of her breath juddering up and painfully back down her ribs. He feels its _a tempo_ percussion down every single vertebra in her spine.

It all happens in the instant it takes him to set her back on her feet. He realizes and sudden alarm bells clang out all through him.

“Kate,” he begins, but her phone vibrates. It chimes and jangles and she spins away.

“Beckett,” she says. She flashes an apologetic smile over her shoulder. She rearranges her features with ease, and suddenly they have to go. 

It’s for the best. That’s what he thinks at first. He falls back on to the work, and it’s not that it’s simpler. Nothing’s ever been simple for, about, or between them, but the work presents challenges that are familiar. It’s a well-explored place where their two minds meet, and when they don’t, they know how to make the most of that, to say the least. But now that he knows how far apart they are—they still are—everything that’s easy about the work feels like a lie.

She notices. She asks him in a low voice in a mostly empty corner of the crime scene if he’s okay. She presses the issue when his reply misses entirely the carefree mark he was going for.

“My head feels full,” he blurts finally. He’s cracked under pressure, like he always does when she’s the one applying it. “I think . . . I think I might want to write?”

She brightens. He’s been doing next to nothing on that front. He’s pushed around a couple hundred words here and there, but it’s really next to nothing, and he knows she’s worried about it. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he’s relieved to find that it’s true. It’s not the whole truth, maybe, but he does have the urge to write. “I think so.”

“Then go,” she tells him like it’s the most obvious, normal thing in the world.She turns him by the shoulders and propels him from the scene. The uniforms flanking it give the two of them a strange look as they bicker their way out the door. They turn their gazes pointedly elsewhere when she gives him a brief kiss and pushes him right over the threshold.

He goes. He walks blocks and blocks past subway stops until he’s cold and tired enough to find the press of bodies on public transit more appealing than letting November sink deeper into his bones. He takes the stairs up to the loft to burn off some more restless energy and stamp some warmth back into his feet. He putters around, wasting time, and then he does finally settle down and write.

It’s not Nikki. He’s far too rusty to touch that at the moment. It’s nothing more than a basic download of the day at first. He writes up the crime scene and sketches out the odd-looking people carrying mysterious things he saw on the streets and down in the subway. He records snippets of overheard conversation. He follows that thread and writes a one side of a phone call in several different registers. He sees what multifarious stories the same lines of dialogue might take him into the heart of.

He takes breaks now and again. She texts him. He texts her, and that feeling that things are fine—good, even—settles over him. He puts his phone face down and heeds the sudden urge to get some of their back-and-forth conversation on paper—Rick and Kate, not Nikki and Rook, and it seems harmless enough. He thinks back to their morning, to the last few dinners they’ve cooked together. He ponders spatial relationships, where he is, where she is in the literal confines of the world. He thinks about the two of them dancing through the kitchen.

_A lifetime_.

He hears the bleak echo of her voice in his head. He feels the stiffness of her spine beneath his palm, and it’s awful. It’s agonizing until the moment comes apart for him. It breaks neatly in two. There’s the pain of realization. They’re so far apart. There’s the pleasure of holding her. The simple joy of dancing with her _now_—in single moment in time. He suddenly knows what to do.

He scrolls back through their conversation. He traces out the five phases of Realizing the Case Is Not Getting Solved Tonight. _Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Anger, How Dare You?, Anger . . . _He laughs and decides it’s time to nudge her toward _Acceptance._

_Leaving soon?_

He adds a stupid, big-eyed emoji to the text. _Anger_ plus _Acceptance_ works, too. It’s ideal for his purposes, in fact. He needs a little time.

_A while._

No emoji there. A definite period. He thinks about needling her a little about that, but it’s probably a bridge too far, given the phase he’s trying to get her to. 

_A LITTLE while?_

Another big-eyed emoji. An actual puppy dog this time.

_Castle . . ._

She, of course, doesn’t _need _an emoji like some mere mortal. Her exasperation lives in the space between the periods in that ellipsis. It lives in the letters of his name. 

_KK. Text me when you’re leaving._

He foregoes the emoji this time and gets an ASCII kiss in return for his trouble. _Acceptance _plus dissipating_ Anger. _That should work. It should give him just enough time.

* * *

She forgets to text. It’s a long while, not a little one, before she’s banged her head against the wall enough to accept that the case is still miles from a solve and decides it’s time to leave. It’s a long time, and she just forgets to text. 

Her key is actually in the door when _his _text comes through.

_You’re home?_

She stares down at it, confused. She pushes the door open, and Martha calls out from the living room, equally confused, “Katherine?”

“Martha?” she says, adding her own confusion to the mix. “What . . . is Rick?” She looks to the right, peeking through the alcove to the bedroom, then through the open door to his office. “Rick’s not here.”

“No, darling.” Martha closes the magazine on her lap. “He left hours ago.” She musters up a smile, though it’s clear she’s moving rapidly from confused to concerned, because concerned is everyone’s default state these days. “I had the impression he was meeting you.”

“He . . .” She stares at the phone in her hand like it’s a particularly venomous viper. “I was supposed to text.”

On cue, another message from him comes through.

_Um . . . Time out?_

She gives a gulping laugh. She taps out her lock code to reply, but he’s too quick for her. Three more texts come through in rapid succession.

_Unless you’re tired._

_You’re home already._

_I can come home._

She laughs again. She gives Martha a tired grin. “He is. I am. We are. Meeting. I’m meeting him,” she says, catching the door handle with one hand and tapping out her reply with the other.

_Time out!_

The address comes through a few beats after she’d have expected it. Her heart stumbles a little, because she feels responsible for it—for even that little bit of hesitation. She lets her eyes slip closed for a second. She takes a moment to breathe through it—responsibility, guilt, blame—none of it’s not helpful, and none of it’s in the spirit of what he’s trying to do. What they’ve always done when they’ve found themselves getting into the weeds.

She opens her eyes, and it really has been just a few beats, and there it is, an address that makes her heart skip, rather than stumble. It’s a good place—a wonderful place for them, and she breaks the rules.

_OMW, _she texts, adding a big-eyed, kissy-face emoji.

* * *

He’s nervous. The practically unprecedented emoji takes some of the adrenaline out of the equation, but he’s still nervous.

It’s late, but it’s not _them _late. It’s not _Time Out _late, and it was—it _really _was—the last time the two of them were here. The comparatively early hour translates into more people than he was expecting. Different _kinds _of people, maybe?

He regards the room from the shelter of his relatively out of the way table, the same table, mercifully, the two of them shared the first time. The bar’s denizens are young and affluent and . . . guys’ guys.

There are college- or maybe MBA-aged kids in t-shirts tight enough to show off the guns. They’re sitting around the bar, downing pitchers of the cheap stuff and the occasional round of flaming shots. A few girls hover at the edge of their orbit, but some impatient hair tossing and low-voiced confabs leads him to believe that’s decidedly temporary.

Another group, half a decade or so older, have their ties loosened and their french blue shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow. They’re monopolizing the pool table and lean toward dark beers whiskey, neat. It looks as if one or two of the girls is interested in defecting to their group, but their acronym-riddled conversations are turned inward.

He watches them all, amused by the contrast between the lyrics pouring out of the jukebox and the decidedly urban snatches of conversation he hears. He casts his mind back two years and then some. He worries that the place is too different to be right for his purposes, but he honestly can’t remember if it _is _that different. He casts his mind back, but then, as now, he only has eyes for her. 

He knows the place wasn’t empty,but he can’t, for the life of him, remember anything but a sympathetic bartender and an out of the way table. He can’t remember anything but her and a passionate defense of pathetic country songs.

He closes his eyes trying to call up the one that was playing when he made the mistake of using the _p _word. Loretta Lynn, he knows that for sure, and the lyrics were something about waltzes and old-fashioned ways, but that’s all he can remember. It’s all he can come up with, and when his eyes open, he sees her face framed by a neon pink loop on the other side of the window.

He slides from his stool, so eager to meet her that he’s willing to risk someone snaking the table—_their _table—out from under him. But he’s barely made it three steps and she’s already there. She’s already walking him backwards and pushing her coat into his arms. She’s already kissing him and shyly telling him to wait, she’ll get the beers, it’s her turn.

The sea of frat boys parts for her. One or two work up the nerve to try a line on her, and for their troubles, they get a withering glare they won’t soon recover from. The bartender says somethingthat makes her laugh as he slides the pints across the polished wood. She navigates around the clueless older crowd gesticulating with their pool cues.

She makes her way back to him, clambering on to the stool next to him and kissing him again, clinking her glass against his in a smiling, silent toast, and knocking back a healthy swallow. She makes her way back to him in more ways than one, and he’s relieved. He’s so _relieved._

“So,” she says as the bottom of her glass makes solid contact with the wood of the table. “Topic?”

There’s a flicker of doubt as she says it. A flicker and then it’s gone—a cloud burned away by the dazzling sun of her smile. She’s with him in the here and now—the time and place outside of time and place—just as she has been so many times before.

“No topic,” he says. “Not tonight.” He slips from the stool. The universe does him a solid. One song ends and another begins, something slow and aching. “Just dance with me.”

He holds his hand out for her. She takes it. She slips from the stool and steps into his arms.

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this lying around for a long time. Finally finished it, I guess.


End file.
